Tom BrantRapoo 8900P Advanced Wireless Mouse and Keyboard ComboThe Rapoo 8900P Advanced Wireless Mouse and Keyboard is a matching set of peripherals that will look good on your desk, but if you type all day the keyboard could get uncomfortable.

The Rapoo 8900P Advanced Wireless Mouse and Keyboard is a matching set of peripherals that will look good on your desk, but if you type all day the keyboard could get uncomfortable.

Mechanical keyboards are very comfortable for typing, but many of them are marketed toward gamers, so they often feature multicolored lighting, sculpted sides, and other design accoutrements that some might find gaudy. If you prefer clean, svelte design cues for your peripherals, you'll want to take a look instead at the sleek lines of non-mechanical high-end wireless keyboards and mice such as such as the Rapoo 8900P Advanced Wireless Mouse and Keyboard Combo ($79.80), which not only looks great on your desk, but also keeps it free of tangled wires. Unfortunately, though, the the 8900P's keyboard doesn't offer a very comfortable typing experience.

Extremely Flat Keyboard

Rapoo is a Chinese peripherals manufacturer that burst onto the North American scene a few years ago. You won't find their products at Best Buy (except in Canada) or other mainstream brick and mortar stores, however. And it can be difficult to determine whether or not you're getting a good deal on a Rapoo product on the internet, since the company doesn't list prices or sell anything on their US website. The 8900P, for instance, is currently selling for $79.80 at Amazon, and a company spokesperson quoted that price as what you should expect to pay. It's high enough to cement the combo's position at the premium end of the peripherals market, but low enough that you may be willing to overlook some of the 8900P's flaws, especially if you don't type frequently and are just looking to improve the appearance of your desk.

The first thing you'll notice about the keyboard is that it's extremely flat. Other than two grooves that extend the entire length of the board, one below the keys and one above it, there's nothing topographically noteworthy, and that includes the keys themselves. They're barely raised above the surface of the keyboard, and when you depress one, it lies completely flush with the brushed metal frame. The result is similar to the feel you'd get from typing on a laptop. Rapoo says that there's 4 mm (0.15 inches) of key travel, which is fine for occasional typing of URLs and entering data, but writers and anyone else who types all day might find such limited key movements uncomfortable.

The second thing you notice is the black strip of plastic that juts out above the row of function keys at the top of the board. It's actually a row of virtual, programmable, touch-sensitive media buttons. In their default configurations, they can launch the default Windows music app; play, pause, stop, or skip a track; and raise, lower, or mute the system volume. The virtual media keys only light up when you touch the plastic, a bit like the buttons on a high-end DVD player from the early 2000s, or the virtual (but non-backlit) buttons on older wireless hotspots like the Verizon Jetpack MiFi 6620L. That means the 8900P's keyboard might be a good candidate to control a home theater PC, as long as you don't mind using an external mouse instead of a built-in touchpad like on the Microsoft All-in-One Media Keyboard, and you can deal with the absence of backlighting on the keyboard's main keys.

The Rapoo 8900P's tilt isn't adjustable, and it slopes forward with a few degrees of "positive" tilt, its back resting on a curved piece of black plastic that holds rubber feet as well as the compartment for the two AA batteries. This result in an ergonomically incorrect orientation, since a zero or even slightly negative tilt helps your wrist lie in the preferred neutral position.

A Zooming Mouse

The mouse, with its generously sized thumb rest sculpted into the left side, is eminently comfortable if you have small or average-sized hands. It's made of molded plastic that vaguely matches the black and silver on the keyboard. Most of the surfaces feel durable—including the all-important left and right buttons—and the build quality is solid. Unfortunately, there's significant room for improvement in the clickable and tiltable scroll wheel, whose wobble makes it feel like it belongs on a cheap $10 no-name-brand mouse. The 8900P's mouse has a total of six buttons plus a dedicated zoom slider, which automatically activates the Magnifier tool built into Windows. The slider is adjacent to the left click button and is a bit stiff, but not so stiff that I mistakenly click while trying to zoom. Unfortunately, the zoom slider can't be remapped to a different command, such as increasing or decreasing text size, which owners of a full HD or 4K resolution monitor might find much more helpful than the Magnifier.

Below the scroll wheel, you'll find a dedicated DPI button, which also isn't customizeable, and simply allows you to switch between 800 DPI and 1600 DPI. It's a feature that's more commonly found on gaming mice, so its presence on the 8900P is a bit odd, and most buyers will probably use the pointing sensitivity adjustment built into Windows instead. The rest of the button complement amounts to forward and backward controls that are well-positioned above the thumb rest, and which you can customize using Rapoo's software.

Like the keyboard, the 8900P's mouse runs on AA batteries, and the battery compartment includes a storage slot for the tiny USB wireless receiver so you don't lose it when it's not plugged into your PC. The receiver communicates with both the keyboard and the mouse over a 5.8GHz wireless connection, a frequency that's less crowded than the 2.4GHz one that wireless peripheral manufacturers like Logitech typically use. But in two days of testing in PC Labs, which is saturated with wireless transmitters operating on both frequencies, I didn't notice that the 8900P was any more or less accurate than the best wireless peripherals we've tested, such as the 2.4Ghz Logitech G603 Wireless Lightspeed Gaming Mouse.

Software

Although Rapoo includes a delightfully old-school CD-ROM in the package to install its customization software, you'll likely end up downloading and installing the software from the Rapoo website instead. Not only is the physical copy outdated (ours had a copyright from 2013 and is designed to work with Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8), but if you're using it with a modern laptop, you probably won't have a CD or DVD drive to insert the disk. The software itself is functional if fairly limited in scope, and even the English version is partly in Chinese. You can map an extensive list of operating system functions to each key that's customizeable (the keyboard's media key and every button on the mouse except for the zoom and DPI selector). There's also an option to record your own macros, pair the keyboard and mouse if they lose the wireless connection, and restore default settings. There's no battery life indicator, though, and you can't change scroll speed or tracking sensitivity, both of which are available in the far superior software for most Logitech peripherals. There's also no Mac version; while the peripherals should work with a Mac, the software won't.

Rapoo offers a two-year limited warranty for the 8900P. The company doesn't advertise expected battery life for the keyboard or the mouse.

Looks Good, Feels Mediocre

The Rapoo 8900P combo is a good choice if you're looking to spruce up your desk with a mouse and keyboard that almost certainly look better than the stock models that came with your desktop PC. At $79, it won't break the bank, and most users other than serious gamers will find its mouse to be comfortable and reasonably customizeable. However, the main strength of its keyboard is that it looks good—the shallow key travel and inflexible tilt make it best suited for kitchen or home theater PCs that get lightly used, and people who type all day long will likely find it uncomfortable. If that's you, it's probably best to purchase a mechanical keyboard and a separate mouse, such as the Editors' Choice Logitech MX Master 2S.

As a hardware analyst, Tom tests and reviews laptops, peripherals, and much more at PC Labs in New York City. He previously covered the consumer tech beat as a news reporter for PCMag in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where he rode in several self-driving cars and witnessed the rise and fall of many startups. Before that, he worked for PCMag's sister site, Computer Shopper, where he occasionally dunked waterproof hard drives in glasses of water. In his spare time, he's written on topics as...
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